No Nonsense

Recently a copy of A J Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logicpassed through S I Towers, and it caused quite a stir. It’s a short book and very readable – and, I was amazed to learn, was written when the author was younger than I am. It is a beautifully argued manifesto of logical positivism.

Philosophy, for most people, is the asking of Big Questions. Is there a god? What happens after we die? Does the world disappear when we close our eyes? What is ‘truth’? What is ‘good’? And these questions are called Big Questions precisely because thousands of years of arguing have got us no closer to answering them.

Logical positivism was an attempt to tackle these issues from a different angle. Rather than attempting to answer these questions, the project of the positivists was to decide whether or not the questions could be answered. Here, briefly, is how they set about it.

Forget about what you can see. Think instead about what you can say.

The human vocal apparatus make it possible for you to generate all sorts of noises. Most noises are just that – noises – but some are words. Most combinations of words are nonsense: “Mill food only here bushes pardon speak and.” However, some combinations are full sentences, like “I am wearing shoes” or “The sky is green”.

The important point is that almost everything you could possibly say is actually nonsense. The things that actually mean anything – sentences – are a tiny minority. What is it about these particular utterances that makes them important? Well, sentences have a structure. They obey rules. They are not self-contradictory, like the sentence “X is and is not Y”, which is meaningless and indistinguishable from noise.

In fact, there are only two kinds of sentences that are worth talking about: sentences describing the world, and sentences describing other sentences. Any other kind of sentence is uninteresting, because hearing them does not increase one’s knowledge of the world. It’s just noise.

Now, how do we know which sentences describe the world? That’s easy: these are the sentences that can be checked against what we observe around us. “The sky is green” is an attempt to describe the world, and it is well-phrased, logical, and verifiable. It just happens to be false, because it does not match observations that show the sky is blue. The sentence “I am wearing shoes” is true (at the moment).

If you know all the meaningful, true sentences about the world, and all the meaningful, true sentences about other sentences, you will know everything that it is possible to know about the universe. Obviously, in our lifetimes we will never have this perfect knowledge. There are some things that we will never know. However, adopting this stance gives us a tool for cutting away the layers of nonsense that surround us and prevent us from understanding the world.

Does god exist? If you mean, does he exist in the world, does he have an actual location and mass and velocity we could check, then the answer is – maybe. We don’t know, but we could in principle find out. But if you mean, does he exist somehow outside the world, in a place we can never experience, then there is no question here to answer, because in that case sentences containing the word “god” are meaningless. It is impossible for an atheist to disprove the existence of god, but at the same time, anybody religious who talks about god is just making noises. What happens after we die? Again, things that happen outside the “real world” are not subject to verification, anyone who talks about it is taking nonsense. Likewise the question about the world disappearing when we close our eyes: it’s not a question that can be meaningfully answered. What is truth? Good correspondence between a sentence and observation. What is good? Whatever people say is good; people argue about it, but they argue by appeal to emotion, not to logic, unless it is to show that one’s values are inconsistent.

A lot of this is not new. Hume, much earlier, said that a book that didn’t talk about things observed or calculated should be cast onto the flames because there was nothing in it worth reading. But what the logical positivists added was the system of formal logic developed by Russell and Wittgenstein. For lovers of clarity and precision of writing, the appeal is still strong.

REFERENCES

As always, I am not a philosopher, and could easily be getting aspects of this wrong. If so, I would be delighted to be set right by someone who knows more about it than me.

A J Ayer’s book was Language, Truth and Logic. The reference to Hume comes from his Enquiry.

3 Responses

Here’s a fun Chomsky sentence that you may have already heard of. Your post reminded me of it: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Each word is meaningful on its own, but as soon as one is combined with its fellow constituents, it becomes meaningless. Something green cannot be colorless, ideas cannot have color (let alone colorless color), ideas cannot sleep (except maybe metaphorically if you really stretch it), and how on earth can something sleep furiously? These things are not really true or false, they’re just….vacant. They’re like dividing by zero.

I knew the quote, but never really connected it with the idea of things going from meaningful to meaningless when combined with other meaningful things. Interesting. Makes me want to read more on semiotics and semantics, about which I know nothing.

Also, disgracefully, that is the only line of Chomsky listed in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. It may be a a contributing factor as to why I don’t own a copy any more…